Netypické přízvukování v češtině

Lexical stress has received a lot of attention in Czech, but some questions remain unresolved. This paper examines two such aspects related to untypical stressing in Czech. The first concerns the length of anacruses (most sources admit the possibility of only one unstressed syllable at the beginning of a prosodic phrase). The second aspect is monosyllabic stress groups, and specifically situations which involve stress clash. Both anacruses and stress clash contexts are investigated in a corpus of two communicatively valid genres, newsreading and audiobooks (with 16 speakers for each genre), and related to the information structure of the utterances. The analysis revealed that more than one quarter of anacruses contain two (and rarely even three) syllables; typically such longer anacruses feature words which are contextually predictable and/or are semantically bleached. As for monosyllabic stress groups, more than two thirds have been surprisingly found to be formed by synsemantic rather than autosemantic words; these items thus reveal a prosodic-semantic conflict, with prosodic prominence occurring in informationally weak contexts.